Warhammer Online Should Now Be Single-Player Museum, Mythic Dev Says

There's an executable in the recently shuttered Warhammer Online that could change everything.

Warhammer Online is dead and gone. The servers are offline for good, and with them went the world. "It's one of the cruel realities of MMORPG development," says developer Josh Drescher. "You can't just load up your old work years later and show it off to your kids." Except, points out Andrew Meggs, formerly of Mythic Entertainment, this time you can and, in an open letter, he asks EA to do just that.

There's a single player executable hidden away in the code. It was never intended to run the game, and all it can actually do is let players into the world without a server. That means no NPCs, no goals, no gameplay of any kind. It wouldn't compete against future releases, since it can't be played, not in any meaningful sense.

"It's not a game any more," Maggs says. "It's a place for the die-hard fans to visit by themselves." Watch a sunset, see the campfires eternally burning. But, more importantly, see the creation that all those developers poured heart, soul and countless hours of labor into, building something that no longer exists.

Warhammer Online is nothing without the players, but that wouldn't be the point. The version Maggs envisions is a kind of museum, in which a little bit of gaming history is preserved for as long as gamers still have it installed on their drives.

"I can't do this; I left behind the code when I left EA," says Maggs. "But there are people inside EA who can easily make this happen. Please do."